[tdwg-tapir] TapirLite and SimpleFiltering pages

Renato De Giovanni renato at cria.org.br
Thu Oct 20 18:49:59 CEST 2005


Hi Roger,

No need to be nervous, tapirs are friendly animals... ;-)

I really like the idea of TapirLite.
Originally the capibilities response had a specific section to 
indicate the supported operations. I think we could bring it back, 
making ping, metadata, and capabilities the only mandatory 
operations, as suggested. For consistency, perhaps we could make the 
accepted views subelements of the corresponding operation element. 
And since dynamic views can actually be represented by the 
functionality of the search operation, they would become optional.

So for TapirLite implementations, that section could look like:

<operations>
  <ping/>
  <metadata/>
  <capabilities/>
  <view>
    <view identifier="http://tdwg.org/tapir/views/a" alias="a"/>
    <view identifier="http://tdwg.org/tapir/views/b" alias="b"/>
  </view>
</operations>

I also like the idea of only using view ids: GUIDs redirecting to the 
respective xml definitions. The alias would be the view name used in 
URLs.

About filtering, I think it's already possible to have an empty 
section "operators" in the capabilities response. And when a 
TapirLite provider says it understands a particular view, even if 
that view contains an XML-encoded filter the provider could hard code 
the local translation for that filter and not necessarily be able to 
parse generic filters.

Regarding the new "id-defined" operator, I was thinking if there's 
another way to achieve the same results. Perhaps by creating an 
additional attribute in the <parameter> element called "optional". 
"Optional" could also be optional, and when not specified the 
parameter would be considered mandatory. An explicit optional="true" 
combined with the inexistence of the parameter could have the effect 
of telling the parser to ignore that condition. Just another idea...

Best Regards,
--
Renato

On 20 Oct 2005 at 11:41, Roger Hyam wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I am nervous at being the first to post to this most esteemed list but
> here goes.
> 
> I have just added two pages to the wiki concerning minor changes that
> could be made to the protocol to make it easier to implement 'Lite'
> versions of Tapir providers.
> 
> http://ww3.bgbm.org/protocolwiki/TapirLite
> http://ww3.bgbm.org/protocolwiki/SimpleFiltering
> 
> Please read and add your support or reservations to the wiki or
> discuss it here.
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Roger





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